Low-Latency Multi-Flow Cooperative Broadcast in Fading Wireless Networks

Though a cooperative broadcast scheme has been proposed for fading environments, it has two defects: First, it only handles a packet flow from a single source node in the network, but does not consider the scenario of multiple packet flows simultaneously broadcasted from different source nodes. Second, it only allows a single relay node to forward a packet in each time slot, though multiple relay nodes forwarding in a time slot can significantly reduce broadcast latency. In this paper, we aim achieve low-latency multi-flow broadcast in wireless multi-hop networks with fading channels. To describe the interference among the transmission in different flows, we incorporate the Rayleigh fading model to the signal to noise ratio (SNR) model. Then, we introduce a cooperative diversity scheme which allows multiple relays forwarding in a time slot to reduce broadcast latency. We then formulate an interesting problem: In a fading environment, what is the optimal relay allocation schedule to minimize the broadcast latency? We propose a warm up heuristic algorithm for single-flow cooperative broadcast, based on which, we further propose a heuristic algorithm for multi-flow cooperative broadcast. Simulation results demonstrate that the two algorithms achieve lower broadcast latency than a previous method.